Four Styles Descended From a Healing Ritual

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Kandyan dance did not begin as a processional art. Anthropological fieldwork traces its steps, drumming patterns and masked characters to the Kohomba Kankariya, an elaborate village ritual performed to invoke the deity Kohomba for healing and for the protection of a community, traditionally the work of a hereditary caste of drummers and dancers rather than a performance staged for an audience. Out of that ritual base grew the four recognized styles that make up Kandyan dance today. Ves, danced bare chested in an elaborate headdress and silver ornament, is the most formal and today the style most associated with the tradition as a whole. Naiyandi accompanies a ritual invocation and precedes the ves dance in a full performance. Udekki is built around a small hand held drum of the same name, played and danced simultaneously by the same performer. Pantheru takes its name from a tambourine like instrument and is danced in a circular pattern. All four descend from the same ritual complex and share a common vocabulary of footwork, leaps and drumming rhythm, even as they diverged into distinct roles within a full Kandyan performance. The tradition's move from a village healing rite performed for a specific family or community into a stage art performed before a general audience did not happen all at once, and it accelerated sharply in the twentieth century as the dance took on a new civic role.